'Fences' Star Viola Davis Will Submit for Best Supporting Actress, Not Best Actress, at the Oscars

Viola Davis has twice been nominated for an Academy Award — for supporting actress for 2009’s Doubt and for lead actress for 2012’s The Help. While she’s yet to bring home a gold statuette, she’ll likely again vie for Oscar glory early next year, courtesy of her upcoming December drama Fences, in which she stars opposite Denzel Washington in an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 play. Variety is reporting that Davis and the movie’s studio Paramount have decided to submit her performance in the Best Supporting Actress category — a decision that could impact an overcrowded Best Actress field.

The decision ends recent speculation about the award-season tack Davis would take with the movie version of Fences. She’d first played the role — the matriarch of a 1950s family in Pittsburgh — on stage opposite Washington in a 2010 production that earned them both Tony awards in the lead acting categories. The move could elicit a new wave of “category fraud!” cries from pundits — eventual Oscar winner Alicia Vikander was in a similar spot last year, when she submitted herself for the Best Supporting Actress category for her turn in The Danish Girl, even though she was on-screen as much as lead actor Eddie Redmayne. Davis’ choice does let her avoid a logjam in the Best Actress category, what with Natalie Portman (Jackie), Emma Stone (La La Land), Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Annette Bening (20th Century Women), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins), Amy Adams (Arrival, Nocturnal Animals) and Sonia Braga (Aquarius) — among others — all possibly in contention.

Of course, this means Davis would still have to cope with a sturdy group of potential competitors in the supporting class, including such contenders as Michelle Williams (Manchester by the Sea), Nicole Kidman (Lion), Kristen Stewart (Certain Women, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), Lupita Nyong’o (Queen of Katwe), and Naomie Harris (Moonlight). Which is another way of saying — while Davis’ chances may be enhanced by this award-category approach, the larger takeaway from this news is that 2016 has been a good year for women in both leading and supporting roles.

Watch the trailer for ‘Fences:’